Hamlet the Thoughtful

The film directed by
and starring Kevin Kline was actually intended as a television presentation of
the play from the 1990 New York Shakespeare Festival.

It doesn't deliver
what people expect of Hamlet since it places the action on a bare stage but in an imagined modern
setting and with modern dress. In this version of the play, the student Hamlet returns from university for his father's
funeral to find his widowed mother already remarried to his uncle.

The
dialogue is still Shakespeare's—at three hours long, it's relatively
faithful—but the interpretations are unusual.

Kline's Hamlet is quiet-spoken and thoughtful for much of the time, making his periodic, irrational flailing out all the more dramatic. His "To be or not to be" speech, for example, is hardly a speech at all, but is almost whispered (albeit a stage whipser), like a man speaking to himself, drawing us into the working of his tortured mind—a revelatory sequence that makes a strange sense of his subsequent cruel berating of Ophelia that drives her to oblivion.